Here’s The Situation
If you operate a fastgrowing restaurant chain, there are few decisions more critical to the success of your enterprise than site selection. Going on instinct may have worked in the past, but it won’t now that you’re growing outside of your home market. You’ll need a detailed customer profile and a predictive model to accurately forecast the performance of potential franchise locations.
This is precisely the situation Which Wich found itself in. With more than 200 locations open or under development in the U.S. and Canada, the company was growing rapidly. It needed a growth model for market planning and it needed it fast.
Our Solution
In this situation, you start with the fundamentals: Who’s your customer? It’s a question that’s frequently harder to answer than it seems on the surface. Sure, you can describe your demographics. But what do you really know about your customers from a measurable standpoint? Where do they live? Most important, where can you find more people just like them?
In the case of Which Wich, the company had accumulated a significant amount of customer data from a variety of different sources — loyalty cards, customer surveys, an email club — but it wasn’t integrated, and they hadn’t used it to create a portrait of the ideal restaurant customer.
Using Buxton tool sets, our analysts compiled and scrubbed the client data, combining it with our own proprietary consumer data to produce detailed, segmented profiles of prospective Which Wich customers. The Which Wich customer is typically a multi-adult household with children and a higher than-median income. Their interests include fitness and healthy living.
Using these customer profiles and behaviors, we created a predictive model identifying optimal future franchise locations — right down to the local street intersection. A road map to success. Literally.
Check Out These Results
How’s this for fast: Within six weeks of the signed agreement, Which Wich had its own customized data model running on the Buxton SCOUT platform, accessible by computer or mobile device 24 hours a day.
Now the Which Wich site-selection team can:
• Drop a pin and predict the performance of any location, in any market, in real time.
• Gauge the potential for expansion in all U.S. markets.
• Clearly see how many Which Wich restaurants a given territory can absorb, ensuring that markets are not underserved or oversold.
Every organization can achieve greater success by knowing its customers with greater precision and predictability. To learn more about using customer analytics to help with real estate and marketing decisions, contact us today.